14-22 September 2019 at the V&A London

Social

Main menu

Deborah Riley

Production Designer, Game of Thrones

About Speaker

Starting her design study as an architecture student at Australia’s University of Queensland in 1991 and going on to complete a stage design degree at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Deborah Riley moved relatively quickly into the art department of film.

Starting on The Matrix (1999) as a set designer, she then worked on Anna and the King (1999) in Malaysia and returned to Sydney for Moulin Rouge! (2001). Deborah’s first involvement in large-scale event art direction was the closing ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.

Mentored by the production designer Brigitte Broch, Deborah worked as Broch’s art director on Real Women Have Curves (2002) in Los Angeles, followed by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), which was filmed in Tennessee and New Mexico. The 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, and the opening of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China, kept her hand in large-scale special events.

Deborah moved to Los Angeles in 2008, but it was not until 2013 that the move paid off. It was then that she was hired as the production designer for the fourth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Since then she has earned four consecutive Emmy Awards and three Art Directors Guild Awards and a Bafta for her work on the epic medieval fantasy.